Triple Time (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize) [Hardcover]

Anne Sanow (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 28, 2009 | Series: Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize

For Jill, a young American living in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, life is in “a holding pattern” of long days in a restrictive place-“sandlocked nowhere,” as another expat calls it.  Others don't know how to leave, and try to adopt the country as their own.  And to those who were born there, the changes seem to come at warp speed: Thurayya, the daughter of a Bedouin chief, later finds herself living in a Riyadh high-rise where, she says, there are “worlds wound together with years.”

The characters in the linked stories in Triple Time are living an uneasy mesh of two divergent cultures, in a place where tradition and progress are continually in flux. These are tales of confliction-of old and new, rich and poor, sexual repression and personal freedom. We experience a barren yet strangely beautiful landscape jolted by sleek glass apartment towers and opulent fountains. On the fringes of urbanity, Bedouins traverse the desert in search of the next watering hole.

Beneath a surface of cultural upheaval, the stories hold deeper, more personal meanings. They tell of yearnings-for a time lost, for a homeland, for belonging, and for love. Anne Sanow reveals much about the culture, psyche, and essence of life in modern Saudi Arabia, where Saudis struggle to keep their traditions, and foreigners muddle through in search of a quick buck or a last chance at making a life for themselves in a world that is quickly running out of hiding places.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Winner of the 2009 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, this book is a loosely connected collection of short stories portraying the monotonous, isolated lives of American expats and Saudis living in small, isolated Saudi Arabian communities. Sanow, an American who moved to Saudi Arabi in her late teens, reflects on her experiences through the circumstances and emotions of many of her characters. In "Pioneer," a lonely little boy spends hours watching each creature that passes, attempting to amuse himself without toys or playmates; meanwhile, his frustrated mother slowly grows weary of their monotonous, lonely life and begins to crack. Ghusun and Thurayya, the two young Saudi girls in "Slow Stately Dance in Triple Time," must remain confined to their home, as per their eldest brother's command; secretly peering into the outside world, they witness as much as they can, but they know the life of inequity that awaits them, shaped by ritual and tradition as much as their desert surroundings. The remaining five stories detail the same sense of isolation through a range of intriguing characters.
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Review

"Gorgeous and subtle, Anne Sanow's Triple Time are stories that stay with you. . . . Loss is the base note, but also a patina that softens experience--proof of what should be treasured. This is simply great storytelling." --Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

“This is the kind of manuscript that reminds me why people want to become editors and agents, and why writers are willing to judge contests: you hope that among the bad manuscripts and the good ones and the very good ones there will be one that is great. This book is great.”
—Ann Patchett

“Sanow brings Saudi Arabia to life in seven windswept tales. Each character grapples with the strictures of Saudi society and the rapid changes affecting the nation, both from the outside and from within. A fascinaing glimpse into a world with which many Westerners are unfamiliar.”
—Booklist
 

“[The stories] detail a sense of isolation through a range of intriguing characters.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Fascinating . . . The temptation here is to label this an exotic and esoteric book, but it is the iconic characters that provide the fulcrum for these seven linked stories. Memorable books such as this reinforce the old saw that people are always more interesting than places.”
—ForeWord Magazine

“Impressive. A complexly rendered fresco that delves into a country undergoing explosive change tempered with expat Americans who have been there so long there may be no going back to anything else. . . The stories stand alone as a masterful telling. But there is a thread only revealed toward the end which makes them all the more powerful.”
—Provincetown Banner

“Does everything that a work of fiction set in a much-mystified country should: it provides us with an insider’s view of the many sides of the culture and forces us to query our assumptions about it, all the while presenting us with wonderful stories and characters who are the antithesis of stereotypes--vivid, fully formed, and flawed, yet filled with hope and yearning.”
—Women’s Review of Books

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (August 28, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822943808
• ISBN-13: 978-0822943808
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,805,630 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anne Sanow is the author of the story collection Triple Time, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for fiction.

Her work has been published in Dossier, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Malahat Review, and elsewhere. A five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and the winner of the Nelson Algren Award for the short story from the Chicago Tribune, she has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently a visiting professor of creative writing at Texas Tech University.

Visit her website (www.annesanow.com) for more information.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Unforgettable Fiction April 15, 2010

By Lanegan

Format:Hardcover

A magnificent work of fiction. It's no wonder writers Ann Patchett and Dorothy Allison each selected this collection for a recent literary prize (the 2009 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and 2010 Winship/PEN New England, respectively). A book filled with insight, subtly created characters, and prose of startling beauty, Triple Time's most remarkable achievement, of many, might be its power of transport - the way it takes you to the sands, villages, farms, escarpments, high-rise apartments, teeming market stalls, fenced expatriate compounds, and forgotten alleys of Riyadh. The way it takes you to Saudi Arabia, principally in the 1980s (when the author, daughter of a man in the Army Corps of Engineers, lived there for two years in her late teens), but also deftly time-traveling through four preceding decades. And Sanow does all this - brings you to this land of wadis and souks, abayahs and veils - in a way that feels genuine, lived-in, generous, and fully sighted. The command of detail is astonishing; as a reader, you actually feel as if you are inside a Bedouin family's tent in the desert, or outside under the broiling sun as dates are being harvested, the air scented with them, or in a wheat field watered by pivoting sprinklers tended to by Sri Lankan laborers. The desert - whether being crossed, encroached on by expanding villages, viewed from a Riyadh balcony at sunset or blowing into the city during storms - acts throughout the stories as a source of history and hardship, an eternal reminder of loss and limitation. Do yourself a favor and read the stories in sequence - they weave strands, characters reappearing, differently aged, here in the desert, here in the city. In a book of elegant patterning, its construction of a large, resonant design, fully revealed only toward the end, might be its most satisfying sophistication.

"The Grand Tour" (winner of the 2009 Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award) is as remarkable a story as any I've read. A haunting mini-epic, it chronicles change and transition on multiple levels: change in a person's heart, change in people's lives, geographic change, social change. Intricately textured, yet painted on a broad, multi-year canvas, the narrative makes profound things happen in so convincing a way it casts an almost uncanny spell. Sublime literary art.

The three stories that precede "The Grand Tour" are also extraordinary. The three stories after "The Grand Tour" in this seven-tale collection, while superb (especially the last story, "Rub al-Khali," another award-winner) did not leave quite as deep an impression on me, but they do enrich and ultimately close out the striking journey that is this book.

While not yet widely known (perhaps her forthcoming novel will change that), this immensely talented writer has here written fiction that for this reader bears comparisons to the work of story masters like William Trevor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Alice Munro. Triple Time is that good.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Exquisite October 14, 2009

By Avid Reader

Format:Hardcover

I've just read Anne Sanow's collection of short stories, and I have to say: They're remarkable, inspiring, evocative...nothing short of exquisite. She is a gifted writer, and a great addition to the literary scene. Couldn't recommend it more highly.